Secrets in a Shoebox
by Tajjas
Summary: Sean wanted to tell Aaron that he didn't have to pretend any more. He just wasn't sure how. Set in Season 1, immediately after The Tribe.
1. Suspicions

_A friend of mine loaned me Season 1 of _Criminal Minds_, and because I don't have enough other things to do, I ended up trying to reconcile some of the contradictions in Hotch's past._

_This will be a two-shot that starts immediately after The Tribe, where Hotch speaks highly of his father to his brother, with some spoilers for that and the earlier Season 1 episode Natural Born Killer where there's the implication that Hotch had been abused. Because contradictions like that drive me insane. I also pulled in a few details from the Criminal Minds wiki._

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><p>Sean fingered the card in his pocket lightly as the door shut behind Aaron. His big brother, always the protector. Of course, the fact that it was Aaron's idea of helping still didn't change the fact that the name and phone number of an FBI agent in the city he was moving to was a totally horrible going away present, but….<p>

He shook his head, covering a grin. At least he'd gotten Aaron to agree to help him move boxes and the few pieces of furniture that he actually owned out of his apartment and into a U-Haul next weekend. It would be good to spend one last afternoon with his brother before he left. It wasn't that they spent that much time together normally, between the schedules they kept and the fact that the age difference made things awkward sometimes—especially when Aaron decided to forget that he wasn't a little kid anymore—but at least with him in the city they'd had the option. Once Sean was in New York, it would be a little harder to arrange lunch.

And as long as Aaron was over at his place, Sean could give him that box of photos and maybe find a way to ask the question that had been nagging at him since he'd seen the contents. Or…well, he wasn't sure that 'ask' was the right word. Or that it was even really a question. As much as he wanted Aaron to deny his suspicions, part of him also wanted to tell Aaron that it was okay. That he didn't have to pretend any more. He felt his smile disappear as he shook his head again, but he waved Jamie off when he looked at him questioningly and turned to wipe down the counter. Not that it really needed it, it was a slow night so far and didn't look like it would be picking up any time soon, but at least it gave Sean something to do while he thought.

When he'd had been little, he'd always liked hearing stories about Dad. After all, Dad had died before he'd even started school leaving him with very little in the way of memories, and what kid wouldn't want to hear about how his father had been a hero who locked up bad men and made the city safe? The fact that the few clear memories of his father that he had were mostly of the man yelling, of thumps from behind closed doors and things breaking downstairs…well, they weren't _all_ like that. And it might have been the heart attack that actually killed him, but he'd been fighting cancer for a couple years before that. Of course he'd had bad days. Besides, while Sean had known by the ripe old age of eight that Mom felt no guilt whatsoever about glossing over things in the name of appearances, Aaron had always backed her up when he visited, and growing up there was no one that Sean had trusted more than his big brother.

He felt his lips twitch as he turned to rinse the rag in the sink. Truth to tell, there was probably still no one that he trusted more, but there was nothing on the face of this Earth that would convince him to admit that out loud.

"Hey, Sean, you want to take off?" Jamie called, interrupting his train of thought. "Marie says she's stuck until her ride comes at closing, but there's no sense in all three of us hanging around all night."

"You sure you don't mind?"

"Nah, knock yourself out. This way we only have to split the million in tips two ways."

Sean took another glance around at the mostly deserted tables and then scrubbed his hands against his jeans and reached over the counter for his jacket. "Yeah, keep dreaming. I'll see you tomorrow."

He had a decent hike to the subway entrance, and his thoughts returned to their previous lines as he walked. As a kid, he'd been more than willing to believe what Mom and Aaron had told him about Dad, to push what little he remembered aside on the grounds that he hadn't really been old enough to understand much anyway. He'd probably still be doing that if it hadn't been for that damn box of pictures.

He'd actually gotten the box last year, not long after Mom had died. Aaron had been supposed to go with him to clean out the storage locker she'd rented when she'd moved into the assisted living facility, but then he'd had to go to Texas for a case, and Sean had had to move all the boxes himself. He'd bitched about it at first, but the promise of a couple of six packs had been enough to bribe Jake and Tom into giving him a hand, and he'd ended the day with a couple dozen cardboard boxes stacked randomly around his apartment.

Somehow Aaron had never made it by to help him sort through them, so Sean had ended up doing that himself too. It had taken the better part of the year, mostly because he was a college student with better things to do, and cardboard boxes stacked against the walls were still way better décor than most of his friends' apartments had anyway. When he had gone through them, he'd found that the majority held nothing of interest. Old clothes and craft supplies for the most part. He'd kept most of the kitchen gear, and Aaron—or, rather, Haley—had wanted some of the holiday decorations that Mom had made, but the rest of the randomness Sean had dropped in the campus donation bin. The last box had held more personal items, though. A few pictures and an invitation from Mom and Dad's wedding, an invitation from Aaron and Haley's wedding, two half-completed baby books, and a dozen random reports that either he or his brother had written for school. And a shoebox.

Among Mom's many hobbies had been photography, and when Sean had left for college she'd given him an album chronicling everything from babyhood up through his high school graduation. At the time, he'd asked to see Aaron's album too, but Mom had told him that she hadn't been so interested in photography back then, and considering that over the years she'd dabbled in everything from quilting to candle making to bird watching, he'd accepted the excuse without a second thought. She'd been lying though, because that shoebox held Aaron's childhood.

Originally, Sean had set all the pictures out more for amusement than anything else. They were Aaron's, after all, and he'd fully intended to give them to Aaron, but what kind of brother would he be if he didn't do a little digging for blackmail material?

What he'd found, though, had been…wrong. He hadn't been able to place the feeling at first, not until one of Aaron's early class pictures showed every other child in the class in t-shirts and shorts while Aaron had stood at the end of the row in long sleeves and pants. Granted that Aaron had usually worn long sleeves, Sean remembered that much from when he was little, but he'd always claimed that it was because the air conditioning at the high school was set too high. That wasn't really an excuse that a first grader could make. And as Sean had scanned back in time and then forward, most of Aaron's clothing seemed to be just as concealing. They'd grown up in a place with actual seasons, but there was no way someone would know that looking at Aaron.

Then there had been the bruises. In Sean's first gym class in high school, old Mr. Wilson had made an offhand comment about hoping that Sean was less of a klutz than his brother, who'd always showed up to class with bruises. At the time, all Sean had done was nod in response and then turn it into a joke among his friends: the guy had been teaching gym since the Stone Age and obviously had Aaron _very_ mixed up with someone else. But in a lot of these pictures, Aaron did have bruises. Not in every single one, and they didn't stand out as much as the clothes did, but he had a black eye in this one, a swollen jaw in that one. A cast on his arm in these two. Granted that there was no way to tell how the break had happened nor to know if the collection of bruises extended to his arms and legs since they were always covered, but if the injuries were all from falls or accidents, Aaron hadn't been accident prone, he'd been a walking disaster. Sean shared Aaron's basic build, and while there had been an awkward stretch in there when just running a lap around the track had posed a challenge for suddenly too-long legs, it sure as hell hadn't lasted for his entire childhood.

His first thought had been to excuse the visible bruises as the result of fights, but even then, he'd known how weak the explanation was. Aaron had been the one to show him how to fight once upon a time, and while he'd said all the appropriate things about avoiding fighting if at all possible, talking to teachers, etcetera, he'd also taught Sean to throw a hell of a punch. Aaron might have been a little geeky as a kid—up to and including a picture of him holding a coin collection and beaming and split lip be damned—but he hadn't been a helpless geek. Plus, Sean doubted that even the most determined bully would have kept after him for an entire childhood.

The fact that Aaron wasn't smiling in many of the pictures actually bothered Sean a lot less than the bruises and clothes did. It wasn't that Aaron _never_ smiled—the coin collection picture was proof of that, and Sean was probably better at getting a grin out of him than most people—but he'd always tended to seriousness. With very few exceptions, the phrase 'say cheese' was more likely to get a glare out of him than anything else. Still, Sean would have expected there to be a few more happy expressions among all of the photographs, a few less wary ones, but there just weren't.

Lost in thought, Sean nearly ran into a couple heading down into the station, and he mumbled an apology as he cut around them on the stairs and made his way down to the platform. When those pictures had first raised unpleasant suspicions in the back of his mind, his solution had been to sweep them all back into the shoebox and shove it into one of the unused kitchen cabinets. The visual equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears.

Unfortunately, hiding the box hadn't made the images disappear from his mind, and a month later he'd finally pulled them out and looked through them all again. And thought about back then. Not about what he'd been told, but about what he _remembered_. The yelling, the sounds he'd heard, and the one clear memory that he had that he'd never been able to reconcile with any story that Mom had ever told him. The one that he'd never talked to anyone about because it was so weird that he'd more than half convinced himself that it had been some kind of dream.

It had been right before Dad had died—well, not more than a few weeks before, anyway—and Dad had come home from work early one day, before Aaron had made it home from school. Sean didn't know why Dad had been early, hell, he didn't even remember if Dad had come upstairs, but what he did remember was the absolutely panicked look on Aaron's face when he'd burst into Sean's room not long after. And he remembered Aaron picking him up and hugging him and making him promise over and over that if Daddy ever got home before him again, that Sean would run next door and play with Kelsey until Aaron came for him. Sean remembered being confused since Aaron had always said that he shouldn't go outside without asking first, but when he'd kept insisting, Sean had promised. Of course, then Dad had died and the whole thing had been moot, but thinking now about what that conversation could have meant, what some of those sounds might have been….

Sean sighed as the train pulled up and he claimed a seat at the back. That Mom would have avoided mentioning anything unpleasant that Dad might have done went without saying. Not that she'd been a bad mother or anything, far from it, but she'd always maintained that personal problems were personal. That it was important to keep up appearances and that one didn't air one's dirty laundry for the neighbors. The idea that _Aaron_ might have kept something like that from him was harder to accept, but once Sean made himself face the fact that there was a good chance that his father had abused his big brother, he could kind of understand why. Aaron's first instinct was always to protect, and telling Sean that his daddy hadn't been the superhero that Mom had described him as wouldn't have helped anything. And as the years had passed, keeping quiet had probably been the simplest route. Besides, with Dad dead, he could easily see Aaron justifying it to himself as not mattering any more anyway.

He'd wanted to talk to Aaron about it back then—well, actually he'd wanted to yell at Aaron about it back then; he might have understood why Aaron had kept his mouth shut, but that didn't mean that he liked it—but he hadn't known how to broach the subject. There was still the possibility that he was wrong, after all. Unfortunately, the more he looked, the more he thought about it, the less likely that possibility seemed to become.

Sean still couldn't quite decide whether it was funny or sad that the idea that Dad hadn't really been such a hero had been what had finally pushed him into reconsidering the attorney plan. Not that he hadn't known that he liked cooking better than studying law well before that, but Dad had been an attorney and done great things and Aaron had had the best reputation for an attorney his age in the office in the years that he'd practiced. Surely Sean should be able accomplish something as well. But if Dad hadn't been so great after all and Aaron had moved on to something that he really liked, why shouldn't Sean just _start_ with what he liked? It wasn't as though he hadn't already done the prework, and he had the LSAT scores so if New York didn't work out, he could always go back, but he damn well wanted to give the chef thing his best shot first.

The fact that he'd decided on his path didn't still didn't tell him how to bring the subject up with Aaron though. Or if he even should. He could always just hand Aaron the box of pictures and hope he made the connection on his own. The odds of that getting any of his questions answered were pretty much nil, especially if Aaron ended up going through the pictures in private, but blurting out 'Did Dad abuse you?' didn't seem so great either. And maybe he was wrong to think about bringing it up at all because the man _was_ dead and maybe he should just leave Aaron to his silence. Of course, if Aaron brought up Dad again in conversation he might say something just out of sheer frustration...so far he'd managed to refrain just because he was used to hearing Aaron say nice things about Dad, but it was getting harder and harder.

The train came to a halt, and he shoved himself to his feet with a little more force than necessary. He'd sleep on it. Some more. Hopefully something would come to him before next weekend.


	2. Answers

_Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. Last chapter of this two-shot, hope you enjoy it._

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><p>"Told you it would fit."<p>

Aaron shot him a decidedly exasperated glare, but given that Sean's futon was now safely wedged into the U-Haul next to his desk with some space left over for his boxes, Sean didn't really care.

"Break for lunch?" he suggested.

Aaron's glare relaxed into a faint smile. "Sure."

Sean had cooked off the chicken breasts in the freezer and used up them and the last of the vegetables making sandwiches last night—chicken sandwiches were reasonably easy to transport in a cooler, raw chicken not so much—and he dug two out of the fridge and passed one over to Aaron.

"So you'll be driving up tomorrow?" Aaron asked, leaning against the counter.

"That's the plan. Depending on when I get in, I may just crash on the couch overnight, but Mike said he'd help me unload the big stuff from the U-Haul the next morning as long as I supply the beer."

Aaron nodded, swallowing a chunk of his sandwich. "Make sure you call me when you get there."

"Yes, Mother." Aaron raised an eyebrow, and Sean grinned in return. Aaron wouldn't be Aaron if he didn't say things like that, but that didn't mean that Sean was going to just let it pass. Although he was a little surprised that Aaron had managed to refrain from asking for Mike's full name and number. Sean was more than old enough to find suitable roommates for himself, but that didn't mean that Aaron always respected that fact.

"And this restaurant that you're going to be working at, it's close to your apartment?"

"Just a subway ride away." Sean pulled a card off the fridge and passed it over. "Here. Since if I didn't give it to you, you'd just have your tech-type friends at the FBI track it down anyway. The address of the apartment is on the back."

That got a flicker of a smile, and Aaron didn't even look marginally embarrassed as he took the card, checked the name, and then tucked it into his pocket. "I told you, a brother worries."

"I know. But now that you know where I am, if you're ever in New York, you'd better stop by."

"I will."

Aaron finished off his sandwich at about the same time that Sean finished his, and Sean mentally debated whether to bring up the pictures now or wait until they'd loaded his boxes. If he brought it up now, things could get awkward, but he was pretty sure that Aaron wouldn't just walk out and leave him to do the rest of the packing on his own. If he waited, he could enjoy a little more of the easy camaraderie with his brother, but Aaron might take off as soon as he brought the subject up since there would be no more work to keep him here.

"Sean? What is it?" Aaron asked.

And there was the downside to having a big brother who was a profiler. Sean shook his head. No sense in backing out now, and he turned to pull the shoebox down out of the kitchen cabinet. "Before I forget, these are actually yours."

Aaron took it from him when he held it out, although his frown didn't fade.

"It's some pictures I found in Mom's stuff," Sean said before he could ask. "From when you were little." If he'd been expecting to see something in Aaron's expression, he'd have been disappointed, but Sean knew his brother. _Getting_ a reaction would have been more of a surprise. "I was kind of hoping to find a Halloween picture of you in a chicken costume or something, given what Mom did to me the year that those hot dog kids were popular," he continued. "No chickens, though." He paused and then pressed on. "What there were were a lot of bruises. And clothes that hide bruises. And I kind of doubt that you tripped and fell down the stairs once a week."

Aaron's jaw tightened. It wasn't much, but Sean suddenly wished that he hadn't eaten that sandwich.

"Aaron, did Dad—"

"It was a long time ago, Sean," Aaron interrupted before he could finish the question. "Thanks for the pictures, but it's not worth worrying about anymore."

It wasn't even a denial, and never mind that Sean had never actually finished the question. "Was anything Mom told me about him the truth?"

"Let it go_,_" Aaron ordered. "Dad was a great lawyer, and he did a lot of good for the city."

Sean ignored him. He wasn't eight years old and splashing in mud puddles anymore, and he certainly didn't give a damn about his father's illustrious career. "You said it yourself, Aaron, not fifteen minutes ago. A brother worries. That doesn't change just because you're older than me."

Aaron's jaw tightened even further and he clearly didn't intend to respond, but Sean kept going anyway.

"I started thinking about it after I saw those pictures, and I know what Mom told me about him—what _you_ told me about him—but all I can remember for myself is things breaking. And of you making me promise never to stay at home with him if you weren't there. That's not normal, and I don't have to be some kind of expert FBI profiler to know it."

Aaron's jaw had to be starting to ache, but he kept his eyes focused on the window over Sean's shoulder.

"He hurt you, didn't he?" Sean didn't know why he was so determined to make Aaron say it, but the combination of anger and hurt that he'd felt upon realizing that he'd been lied to was suddenly ten times as strong, and Aaron wasn't the only stubborn one in the family. "_Didn't_ he?"

"Seanie, he's been gone for twenty years," Aaron finally said. "It doesn't matter."

That was a nickname that hadn't been used since Sean was about six, except for that one time when he'd ended up in the hospital at eleven after a nasty bike accident, and he closed his eyes. "It matters to _me_. Why would you and Mom tell me all these nice things about him if he hurt you?"

"You know what Mom was like," Aaron said.

"And you?"

He looked away. "What good would it have done? Especially if I was calling Mom a liar at the same time?" He shook his head. "You were just a little kid."

It was the reason that Sean had more than half expected, and he felt some of his anger drain away. Aaron was Aaron, and there was no point in expecting anything else from him. He still felt a little betrayed—he could understand their reasoning for a little kid, but they damn well should have told him the truth when he'd grown old enough to hear it—but…. "Why, Aaron?"

Aaron frowned, and Sean shook his head quickly.

"No, I mean, why would he do that?" Sean had taken a couple psych courses as part of his general education requirement, but somehow they'd never quite covered something like this.

"I can't explain it, Sean. There are different reasons that abuse happens, and I can list them out for you if you like although I'd rather not, but I can't tell you which one was his. It…." He sighed. "It just was."

"It was pretty bad, wasn't it? Did he hurt her too?"

That got a quick head-shake, although it seemed to be more dismissal than denial. As much as Sean would have preferred the denial. "I'm okay, Sean," Aaron said. "Leave it there."

"You're something, anyway," Sean muttered. The words had slipped out without conscious thought, an echo of the response that Aaron used to give _him_ whenever he'd insisted on something particularly ridiculous as a kid, and Aaron clearly caught it too because despite the situation, his lips twitched slightly.

"Come on. We've still got boxes to load. I'll go toss these in my trunk, and then we'll figure out where to start."

Sean wanted to object, but…well, the fact was that what had happened _had_ ended twenty years ago. And he had his answer now, as much as he wished that he'd been wrong. Forcing Aaron to discuss it further—or trying, anyway—probably wasn't going to yield anything more. "Will you promise me something?" he asked before Aaron could walk away with the box of pictures.

"What?" Aaron asked.

"Don't say any more nice things about him, okay? Just don't. Not if he hurt you."

Aaron's eyes locked on his for a moment, and then he nodded slightly. "Yeah. I can do that." An arm hooked around Sean's shoulders, tightening slightly as he pulled him out of the kitchen. "Let's finish getting that truck packed, and you can come down and join Hayley and Jack and I for dinner, all right?"

Sean leaned into his brother's grip for a moment, his own arm wrapping around Aaron's back quickly, and then he nodded. "Yeah. That'd be good."


End file.
